Sending request via email : issue when subject contains [ ]

Question

Hi,

we have issues with some customers which emails are received but without creation of jira.

I made a few tests and it seems the presence of [xxx] in the subject is the reason. Is this a known feature ? I can't find any documentation on this.

Thanks for your replies

Nicolas

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Oh, sorry to misunderstand the problem, I thought this was in regards to the way Jira was sending out notifications, not receiving messages.

In that case, I'd like to know more about your Jira Service Desk instance. Since you mentioned looking into the mail audit log, I am presuming you're using Jira Server, and not Jira Cloud.

Please let me know what version of Jira and Jira Service Desk you are running.  I am interested to see if I can recreate this problem in order to understand what might be causing this better.

Also you mentioned the phrase "is the string part of" / "is the string equal to".  Is this a specific automation rule you have setup to use with Service Desk to process these messages?   I am just interested to better understand your current configuration here, perhaps a screenshot might help me understand how you have set this up in Jira.

N Michon · Answer

Thanks Andy for your reply, but my issue is another one (from what I understand...)

In the mail audit log / processing log, some mail requests are flagged as "success", but no jira is created, and it seems to occur when, with [xxx] in the subject, xxx is close to an organization name but with another letter being added, as if there was a test of "is the string part of" / "is the string equal to" : [2ORGA] or [ORGA2] fails, but [ORGA] is good !

And with only a "WARNING" level in log, I don't have much info

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Nicolas,

It is possible that some mail servers might see that kind of prefix as a means to incorrectly flag a message as spam.  In which case, the mail server should probably be adjusted to prevent that problem, not Jira.  However, if you don't control the mail server, but you do control Jira, you could probably follow the steps below to avoid this as well that way.

When you configuring an outgoing mail server for Jira, there is a setting you can configure in order to add a prefix to all subject lines.  By default this values is just something like:

[JIRA]

The purpose of this is so that you can more easily distinguish where this message originates from.  Say you operate 3-4 different Jira sites, it would help to set these to different prefixes to better understand where a message comes from.

I created a screenshot of one of my test systems where I configured an outgoing mail server with this.  In my case I used the prefix [AndyJira760].

You can navigate to this page if you are a Jira admin by going to the Gear Icon -> System -> Outgoing Mail.  From that page you would need to edit the existing mail server listed there to reach this page where you can change this prefix.

You could change this to use some other value like () or _ _ or just remove the punctuation altogether.  However you do need to have some value here, you cannot leave this prefix completely empty.  In which case, I would still recommend using something like just 'jira' or perhaps the hostname where this Jira resides on as a means to help identify the instance.

Regards,
Andy